Amber Naslund, one of my favorite bloggers, and a very nice person to boot, has a terrific post today about visionaries, architects and bricklayers.  Essentially, one is the visionary that sees the building sitting in a place where nothing now exists.  The second is the person that translates that vision into a plan and organizes the troops to build it.  The third is the person that builds.  She points out:

There is beauty in bricklaying. In taking an idea or a problem and laying out all of its pieces and parts, mapping out a solution, and putting it in place, piece by piece. I’d actually be willing to bet that those of us that spend a lot of time bricklaying actually relish the hands-on part of the work, the tangible results that we can see and feel.

But I think the breakdown happens because of our tendencies to put everyone’s responsibilities in a hierarchy instead of a web. Instead of looking at the symbiotic nature of different roles, we’re compelled to rank them in order of imaginary or perceived importance, putting ideas above execution. Visionaries above builders. But is that really the right way to look at things?

We bricklayers depend on the idea people for the inspiration. The visionaries need the architects and the builders to realize their ideas. But perhaps we’re doing a crummy job of letting the bricklayers see and feel the true impact of their efforts. We’re not communicating well enough that their role is mission critical, and as important as the idea generation itself.

Is that it? Why do we all want to be the ones with the big ideas, and why do we somehow think the execution work is less important?

As a card-carrying member of the visionary class, let me say that first, in a small business, one has to learn to do all three tasks well, or one starves.  But second, and paradoxically, the MOST successful businessmen I know delegate almost everything except vision to other people.  I don’t know how to balance that.  If I spend all my time envisioning what our business could look like and be, then I don’t sell any money, and if I don’t sell any money, we don’t eat well.  Contrariwise, as the Cheshire Cat would say, I recognize that I don’t lay bricks well, and I am at best very average at architecting, and there are a lot of people, even people that are right here in the Group, that surpass me every which way at both.

But it’s my name on the door.  That seems wrong, somehow.

Here’s a dirty secret from the “Eyes Only” files of the Dreamer Class: most of us envy the bricklayers at least part of the time.  We envy those that can doggedly pursue a course, a bit at a time, because we know that that is the only way anything of lasting value was ever accomplished.  We know that is how food is grown, babies gestated, buildings built.  We know that we are Ozymandias.

As Ms. Naslund says, we are usually the ones that get the book deals, the ones with our names on airports, the ones that appear on the cover of Inc.  I’m not sure why that is.  But I do know this: one of the reasons I have a family, one of the reasons I have SUCH a family, one of the reasons I have a garden that is larger than my first house, and five fruit trees, and six grape canes and chickens and cats and the whole shooting match is that these things remind me that without the bricklayers – without my willingness to become a bricklayer myself – I will never acheive anything worth remembering.

Bricklayers amaze me.  I married one.  And what she has built dwarfs everything I will ever do.

Back to work.

4 Responses to “So, Do You Matter?”